Label:
Peski Records
Release Date:
19/03/2007

Why have one harmony part when you can have fifteen? Or at least, that’s the view taken by Welsh poppets Radio Luxembourg. They’re one of those bands whose records fly at you in a hail of slobber like your best mate’s excitable Labrador puppy - kind of annoying, actually, but you’d feel a bit of a cunt kicking off about it.

Their new EP is produced by Gorky’s Zygotic Minci singer Euros Childs, a symbolic handing-down of the quirk-pop baton to a band whose musical debt to their valley-dwelling forebears (as well as the Super Furries’ early output) is obvious to say the least.

Opening with scatting harmonies roughly as twee as birds flying in circles round the proverbial dunce’s head, and ratcheting up the psychotic joy-factor from there, frankly, it makes me want to bite off bunny heads, spit them in a blender and quaff down the resulting smoothie. If only it would wipe the shit-eating grin off their ludicrous, harmony-spouting faces.

If that sounds harsh, try to imagine a rainbow-coloured Hush Puppy stamping on a human face – forever.

And yet, even as DiS sits rocking gently back and forth under our desks with liquefied rabbit remains slopped carelessly over our chins, the part of our brains marked ‘small joy’ has to admit that some of this is pretty good. ‘Mostyn A Diego’ sounds like Sparks with candyfloss for brains, ‘Diwrnod Efo’r Anifeiliaid’ makes a decent fist of impersonating Village Green-era Kinks, while the gentle yearning of ‘Merch Sydd Yn Fy Mhoced’ could fit comfortably onto SFA’s own Welsh-language gem Mwng.

Their next EP, due in the summer, is rather more promisingly billed as a ‘twisted murder mystery record’, but until then we’ll have to make do with good old-fashioned bunnycide to satisfy our bloodlust. Grrr.